1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed herein relates to data processing devices and more particularly relates to the automatic hyphenation of words in a word processing system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
One of the most formidable problems to overcome in any text-processing application involving line justification is that of dividing words into component syllables, or hyphenation. The ability to divide words allows a text-processor to add syllables of a word to a line of text in order to meet justification requirements rather than forcing the line to end with a complete word. Hyphenation is normally a necessity if graphic composition standards are to be maintained, especially when high ratios of point size to column measure are used in text composition.
In the prior art a technique for word division consists of storing all commonly used words with their associated hyphen points and then searching this huge dictionary each time a word is to be hyphenated. Assuming that the hyphen points for each word in the dictionary were correctly stored, this technique has the advantage of hyphenating correctly each word that is found in the dictionary. However, the primary disadvantage is that storage requirements and execution time are prohibitively large unless a large scale computer system is used.